Did You Know? - Fun Facts About "Finding Nemo"

Welcome to another edition of a series that I like to call Did You Know?. Inspired a little by the Nostalgia Critic's "What You Never Knew" series, this series will allow me to share with you some interesting tidbits, behind-the-scenes information, and fun facts about an animated movie or TV series. Because I like sharing new information with people.

Let's talk about Finding Nemo.

Finding Nemo is one of PIXAR's most iconic films. It was a massive success at the box office, was beloved by critics, and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. I don't know what it was about the movie that made people flip out. But it's certainly one of PIXAR's best, and if you haven't seen it yet, I would recommend doing so right now (oh, and thanks for crawling out from under that rock to read my blog).

Why was the film such a big hit? Many assumed it was because people just really, really liked fish, and started making their own animated movies about fish in a desperate attempt to cash in (which is how we got Shark Tale). If you ask me, though, I think it was a combination of things - likeable characters, funny jokes, great animation, and just the right amount of sentiment and sincerity. But what do I know?

There's a lot of interesting facts that I'd like to share with you about this movie. You probably already know that the film's writer is also the voice of Mr. Ray. We already talked about the planned direct-to-video sequel that Disney was going to make without PIXAR but didn't get off the ground. And I don't need to tell you that Nemo makes a few cameos in Monsters Inc. But did you know any of THESE things?

NOTE: This post is long. I would recommend getting a snack. Unless it's fish sticks, that just feels wrong to eat when you're reading this (for obvious reasons).

1) Usually, when a PIXAR movie is first thought up, the story treatment is written AFTER the film is greenlit. But in the case of Finding Nemo, Andrew Stanton already had a script completed BEFORE the film was greenlit.

Concept art featuring Nemo.

John Lasseter said, "I remember when we were working on A Bug’s Life, Andrew had this great little drawing that he did over his desk which showed two small fish swimming alongside a giant whale. And I always liked that. He told me it was something he was thinking about but I didn’t hear anything more about it until the pitch. I’ve been a scuba diver since 1980 and I just love the underwater world. When he pitched this idea, I knew that it was going to be amazing in our medium. We always pride ourselves at Pixar on matching the subject matter of our movies with the medium. I really did know when he said ‘fish’ and ‘underwater’ that this film was going to be great."

2) How did Andrew come up with the film? It was a number of things, really. One of them was a 1992 visit to Marine World that got him thinking about the possibilities of recreating the undersea world in computer animation. Another was memories he had of a fish tank in a dentist's office and wondering if the fish inside would ever try to escape back to the ocean. And another was his relationship with his son - he was acting particularly overprotective on a trip to the park and "became obsessed with this premise that fear can deny a good father from being one".

Andrew said, "Telling a story where the protagonist is the father got me excited. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an animated film from that perspective. It made me interested in wanting to write it because I knew I could tell that story. I also thought that the ocean was a great metaphor for life. It’s the scariest, most intriguing place in the world because anything can be out there. And that can be a bad thing or a good thing. I loved playing with that issue and having a father whose own fears of life impede his parenting abilities. He has to overcome that issue just to become a better father. And having him in the middle of the ocean where he has to confront everything he never wanted to face in life seemed like a great opportunity for fun and still allowed us to delve into some slightly deeper issues."

More concept art.

3) A lot of research was done by the animators working on the film. They visited aquariums, went diving in Monterey and Hawaii, studied the fish in a tank at PIXAR, and even attended in-house lectures from an ichthyologist. They also rewatched animated Disney movies that had underwater scenes in them, such as Pinocchio, The Sword in the Stone, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and The Little Mermaid. But the one Disney film that inspired them the most was one that didn't take place underwater at all - Bambi. According to Andrew Stanton, "We kept coming back to Bambi because of the way the filmmakers adhered to the real nature of how these animals moved and what their motor skills were. They used that as the basis for getting as much expression, activity and appeal. We wanted our characters to work in that same way. We thought of it as Bambi underwater."

4) Jess Harnell mentioned in a video on YouTube that he read for Crush before Andrew Stanton decided to voice the character. He recorded all of Crush's dialogue while laying back on a sofa in Lee Unkrich's office. In addition to Crush, Andrew Stanton also voiced the lobster who tells his friends about Marlin's journey (he has a Massachusets accent because there are a lot of lobsters in New England) and some of the Seagulls.

Before Jess, however, PIXAR's initial choice for Crush might have been, believe it or not, Sean Penn. They did an animation test of Crush speaking in Sean Penn's voice (kind of like that animation test they did of Buzz Lightyear speaking in Billy Crystal's voice).

Concept art of Nemo's Dad... I mean, Marlin.

5) To animate the characters' expressions, the film's animators studied... dogs. Yes, dogs. Fish don't have as big a range of facial expressions. Speaking of dogs, they also wanted Bubbles (the yellow fish in the tank who's obsessed with bubbles) to be like a puppy dog.

6) Dory was originally going to be a male character. Then Andrew Stanton watched an episode of Ellen and realized that Ellen DeGeneres was perfect for the role. The intent was for Dory to be a surrogate child for Marlin, someone he could work out his parenting troubles on.

In turn, Gill is intended to be sort of a surrogate father for Nemo. He was originally going to be the anti-Marlin, the sort of father that Nemo would love to have eventually realize that Marlin was better. In fact, they were originally going to have Gill tell Nemo about his life in the ocean, only for Nemo to eventually find out that Gill is a liar who took all of this from a storybook in the dentist's office waiting room. This was cut because otherwise the audience would probably hate Gill for being a lying liar from Liarsburg.

Concept art for the sharks.

7) Why is the fish tank where Nemo winds up in a dentist's office? According to the filmmakers, it just seemed like a good place for potential gags and "odd juxtapositions of things" - having it be in a kid's room or an apartment would've been a bit too obvious. When crafting the personalities of the fish in the tank, they liked the idea of it sort of being like a Loony Bin, and rewatched films like One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to get ideas. Bob Peterson also reached out to his hygienist to make sure the steps of the root canal that Dr. Sherman performs on somebody were correct.

8) Here's another fun fact about the dentist - when he goes to the bathroom, he doesn't wash his hands. Reminder: he is a DENTIST.

9) Bruce was named after the great white shark from Jaws - I haven't actually seen Jaws, so I don't know if the shark's name is ever mentioned in the movie, but the shark models they used were all named "Bruce" after Steven Spielberg's lawyer, Bruce Raymer.

There's also a theory online that Bruce is actually the son of the shark from Jaws. No, really. Look it up.

More concept art.

10) According to supervising animator Dylan Brown, "Each film has its own unique set of challenges and we always begin by trying to figure out what they are and how to solve them. With Nemo, we had an entire cast of fish characters with no arms or legs. Since they didn’t have the traditional limbs to allow strong silhouettes, we had to invent a whole new bag of tricks. In the beginning it was a bit daunting and frustrating. We began analyzing what was appealing in terms of posing fish. We put a lot of work into the face and getting the facial articulation just right. We didn’t want them to be just heads on sticks like in a Monty Python sketch. Their faces had to be integrated with the entire body language. Where a human character might just turn his head to look at something, a fish might turn his head just a little and the entire body would pivot along with it. Another big factor for us was timing. With characters like Buzz, Woody or Sulley, you have an earth-based gravity. But fish underwater can travel three feet in a flash. You blink and the thing is gone. We were wondering how they did that and studied their movements on video. By slowing things down, we could figure it out. Our timing got very crisp as we learned how to get our fish characters from one place to another in the course of a frame or two. We always tried to incorporate naturalistic fish movements into the acting. By putting things like one-frame darting and transitioning from one place to another into our acting, the characters became very believable.”

11) Adam Summers, a noted professor in the Ecology and Evolution Department at the University of California at Irvine, helped out when it came to animating the fish. He said, "I remember speaking with character designer Ricky Nierva about a fish character and he asked, ‘Where would the eyebrows really be?’ I told him fish don’t have eyebrows. They don’t have any muscles in their face except for jaw closers. Ricky said, ’Adam, fish don’t talk but talking is going to be a requirement for the movie. So we’re going to have to be taking artistic license with science all the time.'"

12) This was the first PIXAR film to not have Randy Newman composing the score. His cousin, Thomas Newman, did the honors. On a more morbid note, Finding Nemo is also the first PIXAR movie to have blood in it.

Concept art of a terrifying-looking Dory.

13) Gill is a Moorish Idol. Apparently, these fish are difficult to keep in captivity, so him being the one most obsessed with escaping the tank makes sense... although I don't think real Moorish Idols come up with elaborate escape plans.

14) For the scene with the jellyfish, PIXAR created an entire new system of shading called "Transblurrency"... it's see-through but blurred, like a frosted bathroom window. The scene contains no less than 74,472 jellyfish. That's a lotta jellyfish.

15) If there's one thing you should keep an eye out for in PIXAR films, it's references to their other movies. For example, that Pizza Planet Truck from Toy Story that's made a cameo in every PIXAR film since (with the possible exception of The Incredibles) appears during the scene where Gill is describing his plan to escape the fish tank.

That's not the only Toy Story reference. Notice anyone familiar among the toys in the dentist's waiting room?

Speaking of the waiting room, that boy who sees the chaos going on through the fish tank near the end of the film is reading a Mr. Incredible comic book.

A more subtle reference to another PIXAR film can be found in the dentist's office. That mobile hanging from the ceiling is actually the same mobile Boo from Monsters Inc. has in her bedroom.

Luigi from Cars makes a cameo just before we see that the Tank Gang succeeded in escaping from the fish tank (sorry, spoiler alert)...

And quite possibly the best reference to another PIXAR film in the whole movie...

16) Animators were sent to aquariums, sent on oceanic dives, given lectures by an ichthyologist, and had study sessions in front of the gigantic fish tank in PIXAR's production office before they started work on the film. It worked a bit too well, as the initial animation the did of the ocean was deemed too realistic.

17) Michael Eisner expected the film to be a box office bomb. Boy, was HE wrong!

18) According to the diploma hanging up on the wall in his waiting room, the dentist graduated from the "PIXAR University School of Dentistry".

That's one of the little green aliens from Toy Story on the seal.

19) The hardest scene in the film for the PIXAR animators to do was the scene with Marlin and Dory inside the whale, due to a combination of lighting issues and having to deal with all of the water splashing around inside the whale's mouth. The original plan for this sequence was to have Marlin and Dory inside the whale's STOMACH as opposed to its mouth. There was just one problem with this, as Oren Jacob put it - "There were only two ways out."

20) Pearl, one of Nemo's classmates, is a flapjack octopus. And that is a species that doesn't live in the Great Barrier Reef. Also, their mouths are under their tentacles, whereas Pearl's mouth is just under her eyes. This is another one of those Artistic License things.

Another example of Artistic License: y'know that joke where one pelican thinks his buddy farted after the underwater submarine blows up? Birds actually can't fart.

Concept art for Nigel and his pelican pals.

21) William H. Macy was originally cast as the voice of Marlin. However, after a test screening, the filmmakers decided that his performance was too dramatic and lacked the warmth needed for Marlin, so they replaced him with Albert Brooks, who Andrew Stanton claimed saved the movie. While Albert enjoyed working on the film, he was disappointed that he didn't get to record his dialogue with the other cast members, unlike when he lent his voice to The Simpsons, because he couldn't ad-lib off the other actors.

22) Dory muttering "Sea monkey's got my money..." in her sleep is a reference to the live action films Disney made in the 1950s and 1960s, like The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes. Apparently, most of those had a character say something along the lines of "The monkey's got my money!".

23) Gerald, the pelican who attempts to eat Marlin and Dory, was initially going to have a larger role. He and Nigel were to be an Odd Couple-esque comedy duo, with Gerald being the sloppy, messy slobby one and Nigel being the neater and more finicky one. Apparently, it didn't work out because it was "as stereotypical as it sounds" and each scene with them brought the movie to a halt.

24) Megan Mullaly was supposed to voice a character in the film at some point too, but she was fired because she refused to do the same voice she did for Karen Walker in Will and Grace. She didn't think it made sense for a fish who lives in a fish tank in a dentist's office "to be a fictious character from an NBC sitcom".

Concept art for Gill.

25) The names of the boats we see in Sydney Harbor are "Sea Monkey" (maybe the owner of the boat is the one who has Dory's money!), "Major Plot Point", "Bow Movement", "iBoat", "Knottie Buoy", "For the Birds" (a reference to the PIXAR short that was shown in theaters before Monsters Inc), "Pier Pressure", "Skiff-A-Dee-Do-Dah", and "The Surly Mermaid".

26) There was originally going to be a scene after Nemo gets flushed down the drain where he travels through a bunch of filtration machines, which is more accurate to how the sewage system works in real life. It was cut because it put too much focus on Nemo - Marlin is the actual main character. And also because it was basically just a repeat of the filter scenes earlier in the movie. Apparently, however, there is a level in the tie-in video game based on the scene.

27) How do you animate a sea anemone? The animators used the very same technology used to animate Sulley's hair in Monsters Inc. However, some strands were animated by hand.

Concept art for Jacques.

28) Darla is named after Darla Anderson, a PIXAR employee who was also the producer of Monsters Inc. Over the years, she's played a lot of pranks on Andrew Stanton and she thinks that this was his way of getting back at her.

29) At a test screening for the film, a mother who was part of the audience suggested cutting or toning down the scene with the anglerfish because she felt it was too scary for kids. Others disagreed - one brainy kid refuted, "If you tone down the anglerfish, it's like you're toning down nature itself."

30) It takes a lot of time to animate a gigantic school of fish. To make this easier, PIXAR created a tool called "Pisces" - fitting, since that sign is commonly represented by two fish circling each other.

Concept art for Crush, dude.

31) Each frame of animation took four days to render due to the complexity of animating underwater environments. According to supervising technical director Oren Jacob, "This film is far more complicated than Monsters, Inc in that almost every shot involves some kind of simulation program or simulated movement. On average, there are more things going on per frame in this movie than we’ve done before by a pretty significant amount. There was more interdependency between the various departments than ever before and we often went back and forth to make sure the lighting and other components looked just right."

32) The three tiki heads in the fish tank are caricatures of PIXAR employees Peter Sohn, Nelson Bohol, and Ricky Nierva.

33) The baby sea turtles' shells are modeled after Hawaiian shirts.

Y'all remember the Finding Nemo ice cream? I ate this!

34) The climax was inspired by an actual event. According to Andrew Stanton, he wasn't sure how to end the movie at first - he wanted something that would test Marlin and Nemo and what they've learned throughout. "But when you've already gone through jellyfish and sharks and all these other set pieces, you're like 'What's left?'," he said. Then he read an article in the back of the paper about some fishermen in Norway who were trying to pull up a whole net of codfish, but the fish weren't having any of that and swam down in unison, capsizing the boat. He found it fascinating and thought it'd be a great climax. Not only would the power of what Nemo and Marlin have learned save them, but also save a hundred others. This is also what led to the earlier scene where the tank fish swim down to help Nemo escape the net that Mr. Sherman is holding. When they pitched the idea to Roy Disney, he asked them to do him one favor - don't capsize the boat.

35) Even though the film mostly takes place in the Great Barrier Reef, Andrew Stanton didn't want EVERY character to have an Australian accent. That allowed them not to have to somehow locate an entire cast of Australians, which is difficult when a film is made in the United States. But he did think it would be funny if the three sharks felt like "guys who have been out in the outback and sort of separate from society a little bit", so all three of them are voiced by actual Australian actors.

36) A year before Finding Nemo was released in theaters, a self-published book by French author Franck Le Calvez came out called Pierrot Le Poisson-Clown. Here is the book's cover:

In yet another case of somebody assuming that the idea of an extremely popular animated movie was stolen from them, Franck sued Disney and PIXAR because he thought Finding Nemo plagiarized his book. The case was thrown out.

In 2021, a YouTube channel called The Film Theorists did a video about the case, suggesting that maybe it was Franck who copied PIXAR - even if the book was released before the film, advertising for the film had already started by the book's release in November 2002 (besides, production on animated films takes YEARS, making the idea that PIXAR and Disney stole from Franck even more unlikely). It's not like that sort of thing has never happened before, even with PIXAR's work... but that's another story for another post.

37) There exists a fish and chips place in Yorkshire, England called "Frying Nemo". It is obviously not a Disney-licensed place. I guess the owners heard Marlin's "Why don't we fry them up now and serve them with chips?!" line and got inspired.

38) Finally, the movie's popularity had two different effects on the pet fish population. On the one hand, demand for clownfish as pets skyrocketed. On the other hand, that resulted in a decline of there being a lot of clownfish in the ocean thanks to so many people capturing them to sell them as pets.

In addition, people also took Gill's "Fish aren't meant to be in a box" comment to heart. Many pet fish found themselves flushed down the toilet. There are two problems with this. One, this doesn't automatically mean that the fish is going to wind up in its natural habitat, so this wound up causing some ecological imbalance. Two, Nemo was really lucky that he actually survived his trip down the drain. Many organizations like JWC Environmental and Australia's Marine Aquarium Council released public service announcements warning people that flushing your fish wasn't a good idea.

Sources:
- https://web.archive.org/web/20100123232221/http://www.pixartalk.com/feature-films/nemo/finding-nemo-production-notes/
- The film's DVD commentary

Remember: fish are friends, not food. Except stinkin' DOLPHINS.

Back to the Drawing Board: "Finding Nemo 2"

Like many, I was skeptical when it was announced that PIXAR was making a sequel to Finding Nemo. Knowing Disney's track record with sequels, combined with Cars 2 being... well, Cars 2, there was a very good chance that it could turn out lousy. What if they had the film be a rehash of the first one, with Nemo searching for his daughter or Marlin searching for Nemo AGAIN or some crap like that?

Then, in 2016, the sequel was released. And y'know what? It was actually quite good. It focused on Dory, Marlin and Nemo going in search of Dory's family, featured Ed O'Neil as an octopus, and culminated in Dory hijacking a truck. How can you go wrong with Dory hijacking a truck?

Despite receiving positive reviews from critics and making mucho moolah at the box office, nowadays Finding Dory seems to be considered one of PIXAR's weaker films. You usually see it lumped in with Cars 2 and Monsters University (which I personally liked as well) when people are talking about how much PIXAR's post-Toy Story 3 films suck. But I have something to say to those people - we could've had a far, far worse sequel to Finding Nemo. And I can sum up why in one word and one number: Circle 7.

I've talked about Circle 7 before on this blog. Here's the "Too Long, Didn't Read" version of what I said - Disney set up an animation studio to produce awful direct-to-video sequels to PIXAR's movies that they'd distributed, but then they bought PIXAR in 2006 and cancelled said awful direct-to-video sequels. I've already looked at what their version of Toy Story 3 was going to be like, but they were also planning on making sequels to Finding Nemo and Monsters Inc.

And what luck - at one point the script for their Finding Nemo 2 was posted online, allowing me to read it and see how lucky we were to get Finding Dory instead. Unfortunately, the script has since been taken down, but you can still find it on a site that requires you to download something called "ePaper" to read it. Good thing I write these posts months in advance, huh?

I would do one of these posts for Monsters Inc. 2 as well, but the script for that hasn't wound up online yet. The good news is, somebody online managed to find the script and did a video detailing its plot (it honestly doesn't sound like it would've been too bad).

Now that that's out of the way, let's look at the script for what would have been Circle 7's Finding Nemo 2. A main plot point is that this time MARLIN gets captured and NEMO has to find him. Y'know, since in the first film NEMO was captured and MARLIN had to find him, so inverting it is automatically clever?

Actually, no. No, it isn't. That's literally just as lazy and trite a sequel idea as having Nemo searching for his daughter or something. But, on with the script itself...

NOTE: To my knowledge, there is no concept art for this film online, so I had to create drawings of certain scenes from the script to prevent this post from being really, really boring to look at. I'll also include some random Finding Nemo-related memes I find online for the same reason.

Finding Nemo 2 begins... exactly the same way as the first movie did. With Marlin and Coral looking over their eggs. Then a ferocious barracuda comes along and gobbles up Coral and the eggs... except for one, containing Nemo. But what's this? There's ANOTHER egg that survived the attack. It's sent drifting with the current through a vast landscape of coral and nooks and crannies before landing in a soft nest of yellow fish eggs. Didn't Dinosaur open in a similar way?

Cut to present day. Nemo's classmates consider him the fish equivalent of Chuck Norris after his little adventure being taken to Sydney Harbor. It helps that he did a bit of exaggerating and told them that he beat the crap out of humans with one fin tied behind his back. I don't remember a scene like that in Finding Nemo. Marlin, who's watching this all go down with the other students' parents, is concerned - Nemo's been acting like this ever since they got back from Sydney. Dory and the parents are all, "Chill out, Marlin, wasn't that your entire character arc in the first movie?"

It should be obvious that I'm not very good at drawing fish...

After that, Dory goes for a little swim and encounters Percy, a bottlenose dolphin with one of those tracking device things that scientists put on sea life when they want to study them. "Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but I feel like I'm being followed," he claims. Dory then proceeds to spout a bunch of information about bottlenose dolphins, then proceeds to forget everything that she just said. Dory's shtick in this movie seems to be that she's trying to improve her memory but is failing at it.

Later, Nemo is swimming along minding his own business before he encounters another clownfish that looks exactly like him. I know what you're thinking - does this result in the cliched Mirror Routine gag? The answer to that is YES. Yes, it does. The other clownfish, according to the script, is named Remy. If that name sounds familiar, it's because Remy is also the name of an actual PIXAR character.

And this was written before Ratatouille was released. Ironic, isn't it?

Remy looks similar to Nemo, but his cheeks are leaner, his face is "a little more handsome" (what does that mean? How could a fish's face look "handsome"? What, were they gonna slap Brad Pitt's face on the character model or something?), and he has more "swagger" and "attitude" (I don't like the sound of that) than Nemo. Also, he doesn't have a "lucky fin" like Nemo does. When Nemo mentions that his father's name is Marlin, the clownfish says that he thinks he's Nemo's brother!

I doubt they were actually going to give Remy sunglasses, but I figured putting them
on him would help convey how he has more "swagger" and "attitude" than Nemo.

Marlin is extremely shocked, but also overjoyed, when Nemo introduces him to Remy. He can't believe that he has another son. It took forever for Remy to find them (he found out about them because of how Marlin's story about how he was looking for Nemo got passed around the ocean in the first film - you remember that scene, right?). Remy also says that he was raised by a clan of "Fighting Fire Fish". But, what's this? Marlin is so preoccupied with Remy that he's starting to ignore Nemo. And all the other kids... er, fish... at school are thinking that Remy is awesome while ignoring Nemo, too. This, predictably, makes Nemo feel left out.

Surprisingly, Marlin doesn't do much to help with the situation. He tries to cheer Nemo up by saying, "We can't all be athletic. You're a great student." And then when Nemo asks if they can really be sure that this new clownfish is his brother, Marlin says, "Are you kidding? Look at him! He could be your twin. Well... except for the fin." Wow, way to put your foot, which you don't even have, in your mouth, Marlin.

As if Nemo wasn't feeling crummy enough, he also has to share his birthday celebration with Remy. So, what I'm getting from this script is that they're trying to tell the kids at home that being a twin stinks. Marlin continues to play favorites, then Nemo storms off. Remy swims after him, leaving Marlin to complain to Dory about how can't handle this situation. "I feel like I need a drink. Do fish drink?" he asks. Oh, good, our first example of out of place "edgy" humor! I was wondering when that would show up. It's scary how close we were to having Marlin say that he needs a drink and Buzz looking up a doll's dress.

That's supposed to be Marlin in a bar with a can of beer.

Nemo and Remy start arguing. "I see what you're doing. You're trying to make everybody think you're so cool," Nemo says. "But just showing up here doesn't make you my brother. You don't belong here. There's millions of clownfish in the sea! Your father could have been any one of them. So leave mine alone!" Then Remy tells him to shut up and charges at him. Marlin has to stop their fight. Then Remy turns on Marlin, demanding to know why Marlin "left [him]" before swimming away.

Then a gigantic drag net shows up out of nowhere and heads Remy's way. "Not again!" Marlin moans, because even HE knows that this script is rehashing the first movie. He bats Remy out of the way, only to get swallowed up by the net himself. Oh, and remember Percy? He gets caught by the net too.

Dory shows up, and Nemo and Remy fill her in as to what happened. Fortunately, Dory says that she thinks she knows where the boat is going. You see, earlier Percy mentioned that the boat he was picked up by was a "Planet Blue" boat. So Nemo and Remy follow her, continuing to bicker with each other all the way. Why do I have the feeling that Nemo and Remy bickering is going to take up a large percentage of this script?

Planet Blue turns out to be some sort of SeaWorld-esque marine park. Marlin and Percy are dumped into a large tank of water, where a bunch of other dolphins are taking part in an aquatic chorus line (the script's words, not mine).

Here's some concept art for the dolphins that appeared in the first Finding Nemo.

A few days later, Nemo, Remy, and Dory arrive at a bay close to Planet Blue. How will they get there now? Well, Dory says, "If we could just get the ocean level to rise... we need some global warming. Anybody got a match?" Yep, this is a script written in the 2000s all right. Then again, global warming is still a problem so I can't say that it DATES the script. It's still not very funny, though...

Remy spots a three-foot diameter intake pipe in the distance and swims towards it, Nemo and Dory chasing after him. When they get closer, they discover that the pipe has an impeller that it uses to suck in the sea water - and before they can swim away, they get caught in its suction. Uh-oh, something tells me that this is gonna become GRINDING Nemo in a second...

After getting away from the pipe, just barely managing to avoid getting shredded like taco beef (kind of like that one scene from the first film where Nemo was nearly shredded like taco beef by that one pipe in the aquarium filter. Coincidence? I think not), Nemo yells at Remy for being so reckless. How will they get to Planet Blue now? Well, they find an overflow pipe with water gushing out of it. Nemo's assumption is that they can channel the intrepid salmon and "swim upstream". But Nemo is not a salmon, he is a clownfish, and the overflow is too strong, so he winds up failing epically at it. Multiple times.

Then guess who shows up? Gill! Nemo fills him in as to what's going on. Dory mentions that she thinks she's been there before. Gill claims, "No fish has ever come out of there." And then Dory starts rapping. It's just as dumb as it sounds.

Gill finds a piece of a map of Planet Blue. Since trying to take the intake pipe didn't work and trying to take the outflow pipe didn't work either, Gill says that they have to "make the 'out' the 'in'." This requires the help of a pack of sea lions.

Not these guys, unfortunately.

The sea lions steal a parasail and shove it the intake pipe, breaking the impeller. Nemo, Remy, and Dory head in, and discover that the pipe has an echo. Then they have a burping contest. I'd complain about how incredibly disgusting that joke is, but the first movie DID have a gag where Bloat burps and I know that if I don't bring that up, I'm going to get a lot of people pointing it out to me and demanding to know why I'm complaining about a burp joke in this script when there was one in the first movie. To which I say, that was just ONE burp, not MULTIPLE. And, honestly, I don't even think Bloat's burp was that funny either.

Eventually, they come to a fork in the pipe, multiple pipes veering off in different directions. Which one do they take? Remy decides to pick one at random, and they follow him into a dark aquarium tank... to be precise, the octopus tank. Uh-oh...

This octopus isn't a comedic character with the voice of Ed O'Neil. It grabs Nemo and Remy with its tentacles so it can... eat them, I'm guessing. Fortunately, the bottom of the tank is full of squeaky toys, so Dory just grabs them and starts throwing them at the octopus, resulting in it letting go of Nemo and Remy. Blah-blah-blah, chase sequence, blah-blah-blah... eventually, they escape back into the pipe. And since Remy's the one who chose the pipe that led to the octopus tank (by the way, how come the octopus doesn't talk in a script where all other sea creatures talk?), we get - you guessed it - more of Remy and Nemo arguing!

Dory gets them to stop fighting (for now, anyway) and then we check back in with Marlin. He has to deal with Percy and two other dolphins, one a stereotypical diva and the other a stereotypical Shakesperian actor. After Marlin brings up that Nemo and Remy might kill each other if he's not there, Percy offers to splash him over the fence - the ocean's just on the other side. So he does that... only for Marlin to land in a bucket of water left on the cement next to the fence. Belonging to the janitor. You had ONE JOB, Percy. ONE JOB!

Meanwhile, Gill and the sea lions see some divers trying to get the parasail out of the pipe. This could be a problem. Fortunately, Nemo, Remy and Dory have arrived at the dolphin tank. Just after Marlin was hurled out of it. Talk about lousy timing. Speaking of Marlin, the bucket that he's in has been wheeled into a kitchen full of people chopping up salmon. I honestly thought the script was gonna go all "Les Poissons" on us for a second, but then the bucket is wheeled out of the room. Eventually Marlin falls out of the bucket and into a pool, where he encounters a polar bear. It promptly gobbles Marlin up. The end.

Just kidding. The polar bear's name is Blanca. She tells Marlin that she has to eat him because if she doesn't, the other polar bears, Brad and Louie, will laugh at her. They're always picking on her. Marlin tells her to just stand up to them, one shouldn't let their life be dictated by fear and anxiety, which is something he knows from experience.

Back to Nemo, Remy, and Dory. They're interrogating the dolphins on what happened to Marlin. The dolphins are all, "Yeah, he's probably polar bear food by now." Then we cut back to Marlin, who's still talking to Blanca, amazed that he's finally met someone more neuronic than HE IS. And then we cut back to Nemo, Remy, Dory, and the dolphins. Well, that cutaway to Marlin was completely pointless, then. Could've just had the polar bear ask Marlin if she was fat BEFORE cutting back to Nemo, Dory and Remy. But nope, gotta be disjointed. Nemo and Remy start bickering again, Dory gets scooped up by a pole net, and we get some WHACKY SHENANIGANS involving the dolphins.

One of the dolphins fills Nemo and Remy in as to which way in the pipe goes to the polar bears. They head back into the pipe... just as the divers have gotten the parasail out of the impeller. Lousy timing rears its ugly head once again.

Fortunately, instead of being shredded they wind up in some sort of pirate-themed tank, with a sunken pirate ship and animatronic pirate skeletons and all that. Meanwhile, Brad and Louie decide that if Blanca's not gonna eat Marlin, THEY will. Blanca tries to stop them, but they're only stopped by the appearance of buckets of salmon. After they leave, Marlin asks why Brad and Louie are so mean to her. According to Blanca, she's not from the Arctic like them, she's from Cleveland, and they never let her forget it. Also, when she got there, she tripped and fell down, breaking a claw in the process. That's another thing they give her a hard time about.

Remy meets an oyster, a crab, and a clam. The crab asks if he wants to "pull [his] claw" (real classy, guys...). The clam acts like some sort of Zen master. The oyster has a stick up its rear end. Back at the polar bear habitat, Blanca introduces Marlin to watermelon while Brad and Louie crack bad jokes. For example, what do you get when you cross a polar bear and a seal? A polar bear. Depressingly, while that joke is lame it's still the funniest joke in the script thus far.

Gill and the sea lions are trying to block the pipe by stuffing more trash into it. Remy nearly ditches Nemo in the pirate tank to go back into the pipe, but Nemo spots him in the act and flips out. "Hey, don't mess with me. I'm a fighting fish. You're just a wimp with a little fin," Remy replies, making it hard for me to feel sympathy for him when Nemo angrily swats him into some rocks.

Remy tries to swim off, but runs afoul of a sea snake. He's too scared to get away from it, making Nemo realize that Remy's all bark and no bite (or whatever the fish equivalent of that saying is). Nemo and Remy work together to outwit the sea snake and then get the heck out of there, the snake in hot pursuit. Eventually, they wind up in a shallow pool.

And guess who's there? The seagulls! Remember those guys? Two of them are perched on the ledge. They spot Nemo and Remy in the water and of course start shouting, "MINE! MINE! MINE! MINE! MINE!" And then the snake pops up, hissing furiously... and the seagulls turn to each other and say, "Yours." Okay, I will admit that was pretty funny.

So, after getting away from the snake, Nemo and Remy start arguing again, and then Remy is scooped up by another net. Nemo jumps into the net with him, and it takes them to the isolation tank. We cut back to Gill and the sea lions... then we cut back to Marlin and Blanca. Marlin admits that he was prejudiced towards mammals... ouch, Marlin was racist? Or in this case, species-ist? What is it with these Circle 7 scripts and making beloved PIXAR characters racist (need I bring up "Me no speakey Taiwaneesey!" or whatever that awful line was?).

Disturbingly, it seems as though Blanca is falling in love with Marlin. Despite the fact that she's a polar bear and he's a clownfish. Why does a polar bear have the hots for a clownfish? Why is this a thing that we very nearly got? Maybe I'm just looking too far into this...

Then again, he DOES look a lot like Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson...

Changing the subject, Marlin admits that he hasn't done right by his boys. "I didn't know how to handle two at once. They should have been friends, but they're at each other's throats. Everything I said just made it worse," he points out. And y'know what? He's right. He didn't handle the situation well at all. So after that, Blanca swims over to the grate covering the overflow pipe and tries to pry it off. Alas, she doesn't have any luck.

Back to Nemo and Remy. Remy's got a fever (of a hundred and three... sorry, couldn't resist). He admits to Nemo that "Everybody thinks you're so smart... I could never be like you... I had to be something..." Also, he wasn't raised by fighting fish. He was raised by weed fish. Hundreds of them. "Too many mouths to feed..." he says. "I never fit in." That's why he went looking for Marlin. He's all Remy had. And now, Nemo is all he has.

The next morning, Remy is feeling better. But then he and Nemo are suddenly grabbed by a giant hand with a plastic bag! They wind up in a tank decorated to look like a coral reef. And guess what? Dory's there too. Yeah, she's still in this movie. And she's also come across her brothers and sisters. Turns out this is where she's from.

So, now we have Dory's family in this script too. Funny how many similarities the script has to Finding Dory. Like I said in my post about the Circle 7 Toy Story 3 scripts, I highly doubt anyone at PIXAR actually read this script or would've wanted to steal plot elements from it, so I'm guessing it's just a coincidence.

The other blue tangs tell Nemo and Remy about another outflow pipe that the tank has, but then a human diver shows up and starts sealing the pipe for maintenance. Gill and the sea lions are still clogging up the pipe. And the chilly temperatures of the polar bear habitat are doing a number on Marlin. Fortunately, Nemo spots a giant protein skimmer up at the top of the tank. When they swim up to the top, he, Remy and Dory spot a large drain labeled "MAIN OUTFLOW PIPE" that the aquarium workers are dumping the contents of the protein skimmer into. All they have to do is jump into the protein skimmer and they'll be to Marlin in no time. Desperate times call for desperate - and disgusting - measures.

Dory hesitates for a second (should she stay with her siblings or go with Nemo and Remy?), then they all jump in. But Marlin is now pale and unconscious, and it's up to Blanca to keep this script from taking a turn for the depressing. So she grabs a bucket led by a maintenance worker, puts Marlin in it, and climbs up the back wall of the exhibit with the bucket's handle in her teeth. Marlin comes to. Brad and Louie are impressed.

Blanca runs around Planet Blue with Marlin in the bucket, resulting in multiple tourists panicking over the fact that there's a polar bear that escaped from its habitat. They're approaching a marshy landscaping pond... but then Blanca is hit by a tranquilizer dart. Fortunately, Marlin manages to flop over to the pond.

Meanwhile, Gill and the sea lions have succeeded in clogging up the pipe again. A diver shows up to investigate, but then another beloved Finding Nemo character shows up as a Deus Ex Machina. Specifically, this guy:

How did he get there? Who cares, the script's almost over.

Nemo, Remy, and Dory emerge from a pipe into the very same pond that Marlin wound up in. It's happy reunion time... except that Remy feels left out and tries to leave. He says that he doesn't belong with them. Nemo gives a big speech about how he's part of their family, then Marlin gives a big speech about how he can handle having two kids and yadda yadda yadda. But that diver who got scared off by Bruce is explaining to the Chief Park Engineer what happened, so the Chief decides that they'll just have to "back flush the intake pipe". Buttons on a control panel are pushed, and just as Marlin, Nemo, Remy, and Dory are about to leave through another pipe, they hear rattling and banging in the pipes overhead, then see valves slamming shut. "We've gotta go back!" Marlin exclaims. "Hurry! Or we'll be trapped!"

Okay, this technically isn't a meme, but upon finding this I knew I had to put it
in the post.

They manage to get out, but in the process Dory winds up slamming her head into a root, knocking her out cold. When she comes to, she has her memory back. Apparently, the reason why she suffered from short-term memory loss in the first place is because she hit her head while escaping from Planet Blue the first time. And she knows the way out of there, so they follow her... through a habitat full of hungry flamingos. But, thanks to Dory, they're able to escape from the flamingos and approach the way out of Planet Blue - a flume ride themed after a sawmill. With a water wheel and everything. "All we have to do is get to the top. Ride the track to the splash down lagoon," Dory explains. "Wait for the right moment. Then ride the giant splash up over the park fence. Into the tidal river. And out into the bay." Will they pull it off?

Yep. They go down the track and land in the lagoon, and the resulting splash sends them hurtling over the park railing and into a tidal river... where Dory hits her head on a rock. Oh, great, so now her memory's gone again, right?

Actually, no. She's just messing with them. But wait! Where's Remy? Oh, wait, there he is. False alarm. So they all head home, leaving Gill with the sea lions. The end.

Yeah, that wasn't very good. Not quite as bad as the Toy Story 3 scripts, but I'm still reaaaaaaally glad this wasn't the Finding Nemo sequel we got. Much like the aforementioned Toy Story 3 scripts, characters spend a good chunk of the script bickering with each other and acting like out of character tools. Most of the jokes fall flat. It falls into that pesky sequel trap of rehashing the first film and making zero effort to hide it. The new characters were dull. And why does a polar bear fall in love with a clownfish? Seriously, WHY?

I'm honestly glad that Circle 7 got shut down before they could whip up scripts for sequels to A Bug's Life, The Incredibles, and Cars. Who knows what they would've done for THOSE?

I don't want to end this post on a negative note, so... here. I found this on Google Image Search and I thought this was pretty funny: